Chelsea Market interior
— — brick, steam, and the warm spill of bulb-light.
Not only on a wall.
“A long industrial corridor through the old National Biscuit Company bakery between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, where the Oreo was first baked in 1912. The brick walls were left raw when the building was reworked into a food hall in 1997, and the cast-iron columns and exposed pipes were kept. Vendors run the length: bread, fish, tacos, flowers, coffee. Steam rises from the soup counter and catches the bulb-light strung overhead. The crowd moves slowly, eating from paper. — from the studio
Chelsea Market interior, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Chelsea Market occupies a full city block in Manhattan, bounded by Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 15th and 16th Streets. The building was the National Biscuit Company's main bakery from 1898 until 1958; the Oreo cookie was developed and first produced here in 1912. After Nabisco left, the complex sat partly vacant until developer Irwin Cohen began a reworking in 1997 that opened the ground floor as a food hall. The High Line passes directly beside the building's southern wall, and the market shares the block with offices on the upper floors. Google bought the building in 2018 for roughly $2.4 billion.
When the building was converted in the late 1990s, the architects left the bones visible: red brick walls, riveted cast-iron columns, exposed steam pipes, and the original tile floors in places where they had survived. A length of the old Nabisco factory channel was repurposed as a sculptural water feature running along the central corridor. The lighting is mostly warm tungsten bulbs strung loose from the ceiling, so the long hall reads as a kind of industrial gallery rather than a polished mall. Roughly six million people walk the corridor each year.
Chelsea Market is open daily, generally from 7 a.m. to about 9 p.m. on weekdays and slightly later on weekends; individual vendors set their own hours. Entry is free. The main pedestrian entrances are on Ninth Avenue and Tenth Avenue, with a stair from the High Line at the 16th Street access point. The closest subway is the 14th Street station on the A, C, E, and L lines, two short blocks east. Weekday lunch and Saturday afternoons are the most crowded; mornings before 10 a.m. are the easiest time to walk the corridor at a slower pace.